The Apache Software Foundation

ASF Legal Reports

Purpose and Intended Audience

This page includes a concatenation of the reports and resolution proposals
made by the VP of Legal Affairs to the ASF Board of Directors, and may be
of interest to committers wishing to follow the progress and history of
legal policy issues.

February 18, 2009

5. Additional Officer Reports
B. Apache Legal Affairs Committee [Sam Ruby]
See Attachment 2
Sam confirmed that an open list was not a problem at this time,
and noted that he is pleased with the sharing of the load; while
Henri and Larry take on bigger shares than most (thanks!), nobody
dominates and plenty of people contribute..
-----------------------------------------
Attachment 2: Status report for the Apache Legal Affairs Committee
While traffic has picked up from last month, absolutely none of it should be
of any concern to the board. Brief summary:
* General questions on public domain and fair use
* A question about a previously approved license (zlib/libpng)
* Two questions on IP clearance, one quick and one more involved, both
forwarded to the incubator
* A JSR spec contained obsolete licensing terms (Geir quickly dove in)
* An inquiry on trademark considerations, including the project logo
and the ASF feather from committers on an ASF project working on a book.
* An internal discussion on open letters.
The list also attracts questions from users. While it is not something
that we are set up to do (or, in fact, a service we intend to provide), it has not
proven to be a problem in practice. Discussions of this nature from the past month:
* Request for advice on a project desiring to use the Apache License and depend on code licensed under the GPL.
* A webapp developer asked a question about the MySQL license
* A developer of an application on sourceforge asked about how to structure
his LICENSE file given that his project is based on an ASF project
* A general question about defensive publication as a way to protect against patent trolls.
* A general question on internal use of Apache projects

January 21, 2009

5. Additional Officer Reports
2. Apache Legal Affairs Committee [Sam Ruby]
See Attachment 2
-----------------------------------------
Attachment 2: Status report for the Apache Legal Affairs Committee
Very quiet month, nothing requiring board attention. Highlights:
Naming discussion on JSecurity. Probably would not have given approval to
that name in the first place, but given that the name has been in use for
four years without an issue being raised, there isn't consensus on requiring
a change. That being said the naming discussion was an inevitable bikeshed.
Discussion of whether a given W3C license was category 'B' or 'X'. Given that
the code in question was dual licensed with BSD, the question was moot.
A discussion about a different W3C license and the policy of not allowing
non-OSS code in SVN wandered off into nowhere as hypothetical discussions are
want to do. There was a similar discussion about PDF CJK fonts, and it
appears that the direction there will be to dynamically download the data vs
polluting SVN.
A question about dealing with the US Government was handled by Larry off-list.

December 17, 2008

5. Additional Officer Reports
2. Apache Legal Affairs Committee [Sam Ruby]
See Attachment 2
People are encouraged to follow up on the first issue on
legal-discuss.
-----------------------------------------
Attachment 2: Status report for the Apache Legal Affairs Committee
Most significant thread has the unfortunate subject line of
"use of proprietary binaries". I say unfortunate, as it is unduly
prejudicial. The essence of the pragmatism behind "category B" is to
identify artifacts whose licenses, while different than our own, don't
affect the ability of us developing our code under our license. As long
as the dependency is clearly marked and we are not distributing these
artifacts, we should be good. Related questions such as whether such
artifacts can be checked into SVN, etc. should be examined in terms of
infrastructure burden and potential to increase confusion, and not excluded
as a blanket matter of policy.
The context for the above is optional external APIs and compliance test
suites. While we would all love for these to be open, that's not a
requirement. The line in the sand is whether or not usage of such affects
our ability to develop our code under our license.
By contrast, redistribution of PDF CJK fonts, for which the license clearly
states that the "contents of this file are not altered" was greeted warmly,
albeit with a separate discussion about patents.
Other threads:
Does working on Sun RI automatically "contaminate" developer, and preclude
them from working on ASF project? Answer: not in general, though specific
PMCs may have specific rules in place depending on the nature of the project.
Lenya website redesign - ensuring that the contributions are under the
appropriate license.
Obtaining licenses for testing purposes - original question dealt with
WebSphere, but wondered off to TCKs.
Branding question ("AskApache") referred to PRC.
Continued discussion about Google Analytics. No consensus that there is
a clear issue yet.
A naming question for JSecurity lead to the inevitable bikeshedding...

November 19, 2008

5. Additional Officer Reports
2. Apache Legal Affairs Committee [Sam Ruby]
See Attachment 2
-----------------------------------------
Attachment 2: Status report for the Apache Legal Affairs Committee
It would be helpful to obtain a Notice of Allowance from Robyn in order to
pursue registering the SpamAssassin Trademark.
Sebastian Bazley updated the mailbox drop information on CCLAs to reflect our
Wells Fargo lockbox.
Discussed documenting privacy policies w.r.t. Google analytics and
interpreting "internal use" as our project mailing lists. Parallel discussion
occurred on site-dev.
Advised Facelets to preserve NOTICEs and not to modify copyright claims
in files that they copy.
Jira item created for documenting the process for choosing names for ASF
projects. Looks promising.
Once again, a discussion of making section 5 of the Apache License, Version
2.0 more explicit via mailing list messages surfaced. Thankfully, it died
quickly. My feeling is that what we have works for us for now, and shouldn't
be changed unless there is a specific issue.
A company offered Lucene access to archived blog data. There was a discussion
concerning us hosting a copy of this, but this made some people uncomfortable
w.r.t. potential copyright violations.
Discussed w3c's copyright-documents-19990405.html. Overall doesn't look
open source friendly, but we may be open to further discussion of checkin
of unmodified sources with appropriate documentation.
Reviewed Oracle's proposed revised JSR301 draft license

September 17, 2008

5. Additional Officer Reports
2. Apache Legal Affairs Committee [Sam Ruby]
See Attachment 2
-----------------------------------------
Attachment 2: Status report for the Apache Legal Affairs Committee
Things continue to run smoothly. I'm pleased with the number of active
participants.
An abstract question was asked about an ability to commit to a project
given
exposure to prior ideas from a previous employer. In general, such a
situation causes us no major concerns, though the situation may vary based
on
the specific projects and specific employers in question.
PDFBox was originally BSD licensed and obtained software grants from all of
the primary authors. A question was asked regarding small contributions from
people who they are no longer able contact. Given the size of the
contributions in question, the original license, and the fact that reasonable
efforts were made to locate such people, it was determined that this was not a
concern.
A FAQ was added that older versions of Apache software licensed under Apache
Software License 1.0 are still licensed as such.
Creative Commons Share-Alike Attribution version 3.0 license has been
approved, provided the materials in question are unmodified. Previously, only
the 2.5 version had been approved.
A JIRA was opened on documenting release voting procedures. No owner.
Larry helped resolve an issue where a company wished to rewrite our CCLA.
Our policy is that we don't accept modified ICLAs or CCLAs.
SyntaxHighlighter (LGPL) was approved for use on people.apache.org pages.
Nobody seems to know the licensing status of BEA's StAX implementation, so
most projects are simply routing around it.
Larry has volunteered to register SpamAssassin trademarks. Given that the PRC
and the SA PMCs are OK with this, if the board approves the expenditure, I'll
tell him to proceed.
David Crossley has produced a first draft of a project naming document. He's
been on the list for over a year, and starting in July of this year has picked
up his participation.
Routine copyright/notice questions from Felix, CouchDB, JAMES and the Incubator.
RSA's implementation of MD4/MD5 says one thing in their licensing headers and
a quite different thing on their IETF IPR statement. I think we are covered,
but we still need to settle how to document this properly.
Bluesky inquired about moving away from some (unspecified) C++ Standard
library implementation to STLPORT, presumably for licensing reasons.
Everything I have heard to date indicates that we would be comfortable with
either implementation.
Google Analytics continues to be explored. Justin expressed an opinion that,
while a bit stronger than I recall the board expressing, is one that I'm quite
pleased and comfortable with: namely that we start from a presumption of data
of this type being open to all, and work backwards from there -- making closed
only what we must.
A discussion has just started on the legal implications of contests involving
prizes. If the prizes themselves are donated, and are substantial, we may
have to consider such as targeted donations.

August 20, 2008

5. Additional Officer Reports
3. Apache Legal Affairs Committee [Sam Ruby]
See Attachment 3
Jim asked if the board should request a status update
regarding the 3rd party license policy. Sam indicated that
this was not necessary based on the areas of consensus already
are published on the web site, and the items being worked
appear in JIRA. No action was taken.
-----------------------------------------
Attachment 3: Status report for the Apache Legal Affairs Committee
While comments were made on a half-dozen or so JIRA issues, none were either
created or closed this month. I believe that this process is working
smoothly, and does not warrant board attention.
Notable discussions that occurred during this month:
As reported elsewhere, Microsoft clarified their position on their Open
Specification Promise. As near as I can tell, everybody feels that this
completely resolves the issues surrounding the upcoming OOXML support by POI.
The division of labor between the PRC, the incubator, and the Legal Affairs
Committee continues to confuse people. My understanding is that the PRC is
responsible for enforcing our claim to names, the incubator is responsible for
IP clearance (including names), and the Legal Affairs Committee helps respond
to claims made against the ASF.
A GPL license question surfaced -- this started out with Xapian which is
licensed under GPL v2 and confusion over what the FSF claims of
"compatibility" with the Apache License means. Eventually this discussion
wandered off into the territory of hypotheticals. GPL v2 remains on the ASF's
restricted list (a.k.a. Category "X").
By contrast, syntax highlighter (licensed under the LGPL) was approved for the
limited purposes of non-essential enhancement of online documentation.
There was a brief discussion on "blanket" grants and "commit by proxy". This
was resolved by citing the relevant sections of the ICLA which has explicit
provisions for the enablement of submitting code on behalf of a third
party.
There was a brief discussion as to whether an ICLA sufficient when a person
may have been exposed to ideas and alternate implementations from a previous
employer. Our position is yes. Individual PMCs are welcome to set a higher
bar for themselves.
A permathread re-erupted: when are Apache License Headers needed? The general
guidance is that they should be added whenever practical, but only where
practical.
There is an ongoing discussion about notice requirements when code is reused
from other projects.

July 16, 2008

5. Additional Officer Reports
2. Apache Legal Affairs Committee [Sam Ruby]
See Attachment 2
A brief discussion was had concerning ASF committers and members
participating as Expert Witnesses. This is a decision that only
the individual in question can make for themselves, but if there
is any concern that there might involve an ASF vulnerability,
then the individual is requested to include the ASF's legal VP
and counsel in the discussion.
-----------------------------------------
Attachment 2: Status report for the Apache Legal Affairs Committee
Resolved issues:
* Documentation about the Legal Affairs Committee has been added to
the web site (primary source: board resolutions)
* Cobertura reports can be included in Apache distributions
* Yahoo! DomainKeys Patent License Agreement v1.2 does not
raise any concerns.
Significant Discussions:
* Permathread about policy issue about shipping LGPL jars reoccurred.
again this month.
* We are Revisiting whether or not there should be a JIRA checkbox
concerning
whether or not there should be a "Grant license to the ASF" checkbox
and what the default should be.
Other:
* Received another inquiry from the owners of the Abator trademark.

June 25, 2008

5. Additional Officer Reports
2. Apache Legal Affairs Committee [Sam Ruby]
See Attachment 2
-----------------------------------------
Attachment 2: Status report for the Apache Legal Affairs Committee
Another month with little controversy.
At this point /legal/resolved.html contains the bulk of the content
from the draft 3party text upon which there is wide consensus. This includes
the discussion of category 'A', 'B', and 'X' licenses. Henri has a real
talent for proposing text upon which people can find common ground.
The wiki that was previously set up at my request is not seeing much use.
Relevant documents that were previously there (as well as on
people.apache.org home directories) have been migrated to the website
proper.
A JIRA area has been established for tracking legal issues, and this has
resulted in a lot of activity and issues moving to closure.
Two major areas of future focus:
Nearer term is a sincere desire in a number of areas to be more proactive
about obtaining suitable licenses for potential patents. This has caused
problems as patent licensing issues are not as clear cut as copyright or
trademark issues. I'm comfortable having the Legal Affairs Committee making
the call that, for example, WSRP4J and POI pose acceptable risks for the
foundation, and downstream help PMCs mitigate those risks should these
assessments prove to be unfounded.
Longer term, clarifying and documenting the various notice requirements
(NOTICE, LICENSE, README) needs attention.

May 21, 2008

5. Additional Officer Reports
B. Apache Legal Affairs Committee [Sam Ruby]
See Attachment 2
-----------------------------------------
Attachment 2: Status report for the Apache Legal Affairs Committee
A fairly quiet month.
The iBATOR trademark infringement issue seems to have been resolved
satisfactorily.
Glassfish has now corrected the license issue with prior versions of
their product (as of the last board report, they had only addressed
the latest version).
Andy Oliver is continuing to work quietly with myself and ASF council
to see if we can identify and resolve his concerns with the Microsoft
funding of Sourcesense to implement OOXML.
WSRP4J appears to be in a roughly analogous place. There are no known
actively enforced patents by either IBM or WebCollege that apply to
this code, but a desire to preemptively and proactively get a
license agreement.
As indicated in the incubator report, nobody on the Legal Affairs
Committee has expressed any concern with the changes proposed by Roy
for the procedures for IP Clearance.
Questions on compatibility with various licenses continue to pop up
from time to time.
No questions on third party licensing issues arose during the past
month.

April 16, 2008

5. Additional Officer Reports
B. Apache Legal Affairs Committee [Sam Ruby]
See Attachment 2
7. Special Orders
A. Update Legal Affairs Committee Membership
WHEREAS, the Legal Affairs Committee of The Apache Software
Foundation (ASF) expects to better serve its purpose through the
periodic update of its membership; and
WHEREAS, the Legal Affairs Committee is an Executive Committee
whose membership must be approved by Board resolution.
NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED, that the following ASF member be
added as a Legal Affairs Committee member:
Craig Russell <craig.russell@sun.com>
Special order 7A, Update Legal Affairs Committee Membership,
was approved by Unanimous Vote of the directors present.
-----------------------------------------
Attachment 2: Status report for the Apache Legal Affairs Committee
Sun has restored Apache License headers to the Jasper code with
Glassfish V3. Craig Russell was instrumental in making this happen.
I feel this issue is now closed.
In related news, the Legal Affairs Commitee voted to add Craig to the
committee, and it appears as resolution 7A on today's agenda. From time
to time, I see a number of smaller items that come up on the legal
mailing lists go unaddressed. I intend to continue to pursue expanding
the Legal Affairs Committee membership.
We received more information on the trademark concern, and this has
resulted in Apache iBATIS beginning the process of renaming Apache
iBATIS Abator to Apache iBATIS iBATOR.
The Legal Affairs committee participated in a number of JCP and Harmony
related discussions. This is already adequately covered by the report
from the VP of JCP.
The third party licensing policy continues to remain a draft and despite
not being made into a policy, is still useful as a set of guidelines and
hasn't prevented us from making meaningful progress on actual requests
from podlings and PMCs, such as the request as to how Buildr is to treat
dependencies covered under the Ruby license.
There has been discussion regarding WSRP with respect to patents.
While it isn't clear that there is a patent that reads on WSRP, but a
member of the portals PMC sent a request inquiring as to how certain
patents would be licensed by IBM and Web Collage. Upon review, the
consensus seems to be that the agreement presented to us by Web Collage
is not sufficient for our needs.
POI has a situation where a committer has stated his intent to
revert commits which were made several months ago based on a feeling
that there may be patents which read on the code in question.
Portions of the legal site are in flux, and meta discussion as to when
and who can update the site occur from time to time. This is normal
and healthy.

March 19, 2008

5. Additional Officer Reports
A. VP of Legal Affairs [Sam Ruby]
See Attachment 1
-----------------------------------------
Attachment 1: Report from the VP of Legal Affairs
The third party draft has been a significant distraction. This document
serves a quite useful purpose -- as a guide. Shortly after this month's
board meeting, I plan to publish a short document describing how it
is useful as a guide and identifying a few places where hard distinctions
it attempts to make are overreaching and will not (yet) be enforced.
Meanwhile, focus will return to concrete, tangible, and near-term
decisions. The first two of which which will be resolved this week
deal with code licensed for use "in the creation of products supporting
the Unicode Standard" and an optional LGPL "deployer" distributed in
source form.
Other activities:
* WSRP4J is looking into potential patent claims
* Ongoing crypto notice work
* Discussion on maintenance of the year on copyright notices
* Question as to whether we would allow projects to dual license (answer:
no)
* Discussion of various open specification pledges, particularly
Microsoft's
* OSGI bundle requirements will require ServiceMix to create, maintain, and
distribute a small amount of CDDL licensed descriptions.
* Continuing confusion over the split between the NOTICE and LICENSE files,
this needs to be dealt with by the Legal Affairs Committee
* Fielded a question from a non-profit that wanted to base their license
off of ours.
* A growing list of open legal questions, mostly related to third party
licensing.
* Glassfish still hasn't restored the Apache License headers to Jasper
files, despite some encouraging words that they were going to. Yet
another letter was sent to Simon Phipps and the legal contact at Sun
he provided me with.

February 20, 2008

5. Additional Officer Reports
A. VP of Legal Affairs [Sam Ruby]
See Attachment 1
Approved by General Consent.
7. Special Orders
E. Update Legal Affairs Committee Membership
WHEREAS, the Legal Affairs Committee of The Apache Software
Foundation (ASF) expects to better serve its purpose through the
periodic update of its membership; and
WHEREAS, the Legal Affairs Committee is an Executive Committee
whose membership must be approved by Board resolution.
NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED, that the following ASF member be
added as a Legal Affairs Committee member:
Henri Yandell <bayard@apache.org>
Special order 7D, Update Legal Affairs Committee Membership,
was approved by Unanimous Vote.
-----------------------------------------
Attachment 1: Report from the VP of Legal Affairs
Last month, I mentioned a potential trademark infringment issue that was
brought to our attention. I contacted the individual requesting more
information, and have not heard back. Until I hear more, I have no
plans of pursing this further.
Sun continues to ignore our request that the licence headers be restored
on the portions of Glassfish. I have sent a third request (the first
was in September) that Sun follow the FSF's recommendations on this matter.
If Sun continues to drag their feed on this matter, it is time to explore
other options to get Sun to comply.
While this work has been ongoing for some time, this month there has
been a marked uptick in the export classification activities and general
awareness of these ECCN related issues.
Most of the efforts of this month were on trying to refine the ASF's
Third Party Licensing policy, primarily by attempting to create an
informal poll. I seeded this with three hypothetical positions, and
mostly people were divided into two camps. One camp didn't see much
of a dividing line between the first two positions, but clearly saw
position three as distinct and reacted negatively towards it. The
other saw little difference between positions two and three, but reacted
equally negatively to position 1 as the first camp did to position 3.
A bare minimum that I believe that we can achieve ready consensus on is
a policy that all sofware developed at the ASF from here on is to be licensed
under the Apache License, Version 2.0, and that we will take no actions
that limit our ability to distribute our software under this license.
Roy has indicated that this may not have been the policy in the distant
past, but as near as I can tell, it has been the way that we have been
operating for quite some time now, hence the conclusion that this should
be able to readily gain consensus.
One world view is that that bare minimum is not enough. One can argue
that it makes little sense if our software is licensed under a pragmatic
license if that sofware is entangled with dependencies that effectively
eliminate all the pragmatic aspects of our license.
The other world view is that our software is, well, soft; i.e., maleable.
Our licensees are welcome to modify, combine, and optionally contribute
back to our code bases. Furthermore, no matter how hard we try, our
licensees are operate under a variety of different constraints or have a
differing interpretations of license compatibility.
Choosing between these two world views is difficult; but given that the
former can only be executed if there are ample exceptions for "system" or
"soft" dependencies -- concepts that are both undefinable and all too open
to gaming -- clearly the latter is easiest to understand and administer.
Or there is a belief that a "spec" from an industry consortia and with
no independent implementations somehow makes copyright and patent issues
less relevant. In any case, add to all this the evident divide, and the
first world view becomes not only harder to understand and administer,
it becomes absolutely unworkable. Simply put, an excemption for "system"
dependencies that is based on a "I'll know it when I see it" policy doesn't
work if a substantial portion of the people who may be drawn upon to express
an opinion on the subject simply don't believe that any such distinction is
either necessary or even makes sense as a policy.
Therefore it appears that the only workable policy is one where we continue
to require PMCs to compile a comprehensive set of LICENSEs to accompany each
of our releases so that our licensees can make an informed decision. That,
and perhaps to we can increase our efforts to educate PMCs as to the effects
such dependencies have on community size.
While this approach is workable, it is one that may be difficult to reverse.
Hence, a slow and cautious approach is warranted. Should there be any
as of yet unexpressed feedback, now would be a good time to provide it.
I have reviewed the minutes for the meetings of 2005/06/22 and 2007/03/28
establishing the VP of Legal Affairs and the Legal Affairs Committee
respectively, and believe that no board resolution and/or explicit approval
is required for the Legal Affairs Committee to proceed on this matter.

January 16, 2008

5. Additional Officer Reports
A. VP of Legal Affairs [Sam Ruby]
See Attachment 1
Request was made that legal/status be updated.
Approved by General Consent.
-----------------------------------------
Attachment 1: Report from the VP of Legal Affairs
The requested FAQ additions have been completed and posted. These
additions did attract quite a few comments of support, and everybody had
more than ample time to comment. I've seen no negative fallout as of yet
of these additions. I mention this because these additions were initially
controversial, but my impression is that over time some of the participants
simply got less vocal rather than converted.
Jason Schultz has left his staff attorney position at the EFF. Fred von
Lohmann of the EFF has agreed to support us in his place.
We have been informed of a potential tradmark infringment issue. I shoud
have more details by the next meeting.
There is a backlog of items that need to be addressed, preferably in
parallel rather than serially. Rather than waste report time on what
I perceive to be the biggest item, namely competing the Third Party
Licensing policy, time permitting, I've added a discussion item in the
hopes that we can come to a quick consensus on the approach. If quick
consensus isn't achievable here, then the hope is that this will serve
as a heads up so that the interested parties can participate in the
discussion on legal-discuss.
Other items in the backlog:
Third Party Licensing:
Minor update to to add OSOA as category A
Additional updates to cover notices of optional dependencies (log4cxx,
apr)
Need a policy on whether depencencies on Ruby Gems are permissable
(Buildr)
WSRP4J licensing issues (Portals)
Fork FAQ

November 14, 2007

5. Additional Officer Reports
A. VP of Legal Affairs [Sam Ruby]
No written report submitted.
Brief discussion on the possibility of doing a BOF at ApacheCon.

October 17, 2007

5. Additional Officer Reports
A. VP of Legal Affairs [Sam Ruby]
See Attachment 1
Approved by General Consent.
-----------------------------------------
Attachment 1: Report from the VP of Legal Affairs
After an extended quiet period, I thought I would collect up a
few updates to the website, but that re-awoke the discussion.
What's cool is that this time around, there actually are more
people than Doug actually proposing actual wording. I'm
convinced that we are continuing to make forward progress.
Backlog of items include following up with Sun on following the
licensing terms for Jasper, and a "fork FAQ".

September 19, 2007

5. Additional Officer Reports
A. VP of Legal Affairs [Sam Ruby]
Brief discussion concerning the possible need to change the bylaws.
We decided not to pursue such a change.
Approved by General Consent.
-----------------------------------------
Attachment 1: Report from the VP of Legal Affairs
Relatively quiet (and short) month.
I believe that we are making progress on the Y! proposed additions to the
FAQ, and should be able to close shortly. Short summary of the key issue:
while the ASF as a whole does not confer any official status to
"subprojects", this proposed FAQ would officially recognize that a PMC
may, in fact, produce a number of independent "products".
Simon Phipps forwarded to me a writeup by the FSF on how to retain
appropriate copyright headers on works derived from non-GPL codebases
and incorporated into GPL codebases. I posted this link on
legal-internal, and it didn't provoke any objections, so I asked
Simon to follow these instructions on the Jasper/Glassfish code. I
will follow up to ensure that this is done.

August 29, 2007

5. Additional Officer Reports
A. VP of Legal Affairs [Sam Ruby]
See Attachment 1
Approved by General Consent.
-----------------------------------------
Attachment 1: Report from the VP of Legal Affairs
* Continuing to work on Yahoo! patent scope FAQ.
* Updated web page concerning Apache License and GPL compatibility
* Updated 3rd party policy, resolving Geronimo and MyFaces issue
* Participated in two call with ASF council regarding JCK/FOU issue
* Continuing to work with Sun over ASF license code issues in Glassfish
My goal continues to be to delegate more of this. If necessary,
I will recruit more people onto the legal committee in order to
make this happen.

July 18, 2007

5. Additional Officer Reports
A. VP of Legal Affairs [Cliff Schmidt / Henning]
See Attachment 1
Approved by General Consent.
7. Special Orders
E. Update Legal Affairs Committee Membership
WHEREAS, the Legal Affairs Committee of The Apache Software
Foundation (ASF) expects to better serve its purpose through the
periodic update of its membership; and
WHEREAS, the Legal Affairs Committee is an Executive Committee
whose membership must be approved by Board resolution.
NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED, that the following ASF member be
added as a Legal Affairs Committee members:
Sam Ruby <rubys@apache.org>
Special order 7E, Update Legal Affairs Committee Membership, was
approved by Unanimous Vote.
F. Change the Apache Vice President of Legal Affairs
WHEREAS, the Board of Directors heretofore appointed
Cliff Schmidt to the office of Vice President, Legal Affairs,
and
WHEREAS, the Board of Directors is in receipt of the resignation
of Cliff Schmidt from the office of Vice President, Legal
Affairs, and
WHEREAS, the Legal Affairs Committee has recommended Sam Ruby as
the successor to the post;
NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED, that Cliff Schmidt is relieved
and discharged from the duties and responsibilities of the office
of Vice President, Legal Affairs, and
BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED, that Sam Ruby be and hereby is appointed
to the office of Vice President, Legal Affairs, to serve in
accordance with and subject to the direction of the Board of
Directors and the Bylaws of the Foundation until death,
resignation, retirement, removal or disqualification, or until a
successor is appointed.
Special order 7F, Change the Apache Vice President of Legal Affairs,
was
approved by Unanimous Vote.
-----------------------------------------
Attachment 1: Report from the VP of Legal Affairs
As mentioned in last month's report, I wish to resign as VP of Legal
Affairs. The Legal Affairs Committee has discussed possible
replacements over the last month and have reached consensus on Sam
Ruby, who is not currently on the committee. Therefore, I have
prepared two resolutions for the board to vote on: one to add Sam to
the committee (being a board/executive committee) and one to have him
replace me as VP.
There are no other issues requring board attention this month.

June 20, 2007

5. Additional Officer Reports
A. VP of Legal Affairs [Cliff Schmidt / Greg]
See Attachment 1
Approved by General Consent.
-----------------------------------------
Attachment 1: Report from the VP of Legal Affairs
On May 31st, the FSF released its "last call draft" of the
GPLv3. In this draft and its associated press releases, the
FSF prominently states that there is no longer a concern
about the Apache License being "incompatible" with the GPLv3.
The compatibility issue is describing whether they see a
problem with an Apache-Licensed component being included
within a larger GPLv3-licensed work. This is what they no
longer see a problem with. Of course, there would still be
much concern and debate about the licensing restrictions of a
larger Apache-Licensed work that included a GPLv3-licensed
component.
The only other issue to report is that the legal affairs
committee has been up and running for well over a month. In
fact, I coordinated approval of the FSF's proposed GPLv3
wording with the committee (although sadly didn't plan far
enough advance to coordinate this report). I will soon be
asking the committee for nominations and an election of a
new VP of Legal Affairs, with a proposed resolution before
the Board by next month's meeting.

April 25, 2007

5. Other Reports
A. VP of Legal Affairs [Cliff]
See Attachment 1
Cliff indicated that, assuming the current "incompatibility"
between GPLv3 and AL 2.0 is resolved, he does not foresee any
further potential conflicts.
Approved by General Consent.
-----------------------------------------
Attachment 1: Report from the VP of Legal Affairs
As I mentioned in my post to the board@ list shortly after last Board
meeting, the FSF's third discussion draft of GPLv3 included a note
that GPLv3 would not be compatible with the Apache License due to the
indemnification provision. Both Larry Rosen and I have been in touch
with the FSF and SFLC and expect this statement of incompatibility
will soon be reversed without any change in the Apache License.
The Board approved my resolution to establish a Legal Affairs
Committee at last month's meeting. However, I have been lame in
getting things started due to a shortage of available time in the last
few weeks. I'll start getting the ball rolling this week.

March 28, 2007

5. Additional Officer Reports
A. VP of Legal Affairs [Cliff]
I have proposed a new Legal Affairs Committee to
distribute the current legal affairs workload to a
coordinated group ASF members, to assign responsibility
for legal policy deliberation and decision making to the
same group under the supervision of the board, and to
provide a structured means of participation and
familiarization for those interested in taking over the
Legal VP job one day. The resolution is on the agenda.
It is currently written as an Executive committee, but
we can discuss if that is best.
I've worked with Geir on issues related to the JCK
licensing problems, but I will let him report on that.
8. Special Orders
C. Establish the Legal Affairs Committee
WHEREAS, the Board of Directors deems it to be in the best
interests of the Foundation and consistent with the
Foundation's purpose to create an Executive Committee charged
with establishing and managing legal policies based on the
advice of legal counsel and the interests of the Foundation;
and
WHEREAS, the Board of Directors believes the existing office of
Vice President of Legal Affairs will remain a valuable role
within the Foundation and would benefit from the creation of such
a committee.
NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED, that an ASF Executive Committee,
to be known as the "Legal Affairs Committee", be and hereby is
established pursuant to the Bylaws of the Foundation; and be it
further
RESOLVED, that the Legal Affairs Committee be and hereby is
responsible for establishing and managing legal policies based
on the advice of legal counsel and the interests of the
Foundation; and be it further
RESOLVED, that the responsibilities of the Vice President of
Legal Affairs shall henceforth include management of the Legal
Affairs Committee as its chair; and be it further
RESOLVED, that the persons listed immediately below be and
hereby are appointed to serve as the initial members of the
Legal Affairs Committee:
Cliff Schmidt
Davanum Srinivas
Garrett Rooney
Geir Magnusson
Jim Jagielski
Justin Erenkrantz
Noel Bergman
Robert Burrell Donkin
Roy Fielding
William Rowe
Special Order 6C, Establish the Legal Affairs Committee,
was approved by Unanimous Vote.

February 21, 2007

5. Additional Officer Reports
A. VP of Legal Affairs [Cliff]
The CLA FAQ proposed at last month's meeting was reviewed
by our counsel. Small changes were made and an additional
Q&A was added to clarify the future patent claims issue.
The FAQs have been posted to legal-discuss where there is
some discussion to make a very minor clarification. In short,
I believe this issue is pretty much resolved.
A pretty bad trademark violation was reported, which I forwarded
to the PRC and assisted them in an initial draft (with a review
through counsel).

January 17, 2007

4. Officer Reports
E. VP of Legal Affairs [Cliff]
The only issue to report this month is the patent license FAQ.
Following the plan I suggested in October, I've taken the FAQ
proposed by Doug and agreed to by Roy (which addresses the
concern for consistency with Roy's public statements on the topic
while he served as ASF Chairman) and asked our counsel to review
and advise. Barring any legal concerns from counsel, I recommend
posting this FAQ. Incidentally, the question part of the FAQ is
nearly identical to the one proposed in our September meeting;
however, the answer no longer has the problem raised by some
directors (that it was attempting to answer more than the
question).

December 20, 2006

4. Officer Reports
E. VP of Legal Affairs [Cliff]
CLA UPDATE: I sent an update to legal-discuss last week to
let everyone know that the plan is to publish a document
that describes the original intention behind some of the
ambiguities in the CLA and then to discuss the idea of
a new version. Roy has agreed to write the "original
intention" doc based on what statements he had made about
the CLA's interpretation while he was ASF chair.
GPLv3 COMPATIBILITY: The SFLC contacted me about the latest
proposed changes to the patent licensing in the next
draft of GPLv3. I am reviewing now to ensure these
changes would still allow Apache-Licensed works to be
included in GPLv3-licensed works.
STANDARDS LICENSING: I reviewed the BPEL specification patent
licenses for Apache ODE. The licenses would not be
acceptable by the ASF; however, there do not currently
appear to be any patents to license. So, I see no problem
with ODE implementing the BPEL spec. Another spec reviewed
was the Yahoo-submitted IETF RFC on DomainKeys. Noel
submitted this to legal-internal by Noel for review during
ApacheCon US. I reviewed and commented on it there; while
not ideal, it appears reasonable and should not hold back
our development. My analyses for both BPEL and DomainKeys
was approved by our legal counsel on legal-internal.

November 15, 2006

4. Officer Reports
E. VP of Legal Affairs [Cliff]
Cliff reported that work is continuing on the "crypto export"
clarifications for use within the ASF. Also being worked on
is the standards licensing. Cliff noted that SenderID is
covered under the Open Specification promise, and therefore
removes any restrictions on use.

October 25, 2006

4. Officer Reports
E. VP of Legal Affairs [Cliff]
Cliff reported that during ApacheCon, the CCLA issue was further
discussed with many people, especially Roy and Doug Cutting. Both
Roy and Doug were happy with the approach taken and Roy committed
to "writing up" what his intents were with the CCLA, so that
misinterpretation of the letter and spirit of the CCLA no longer
exists.
Cliff indicated his desire to create a sort of Legal Committee,
similar to the PRC or Security Team, to allow for a wider
range of volunteers to help with the various legal issues and
questions still being worked on. His hope is also that this
will provide an opportunity for him to resign from the VP of
Legal Affairs position after a period of time.
Cliff reported that a number of Universities and Colleges have
contacted him regarding their own efforts in creating suitable
licenses for their open source educational software. Cliff
suggested that the ASF possible provide feedback and insights
regarding our experiences with the AL as well as the iCLA and
CCLAs.

September 20, 2006

4. Officer Reports
E. VP of Legal Affairs [Cliff]
CRYPTO EXPORT DOCS: This work has been complete for over a
month and projects are now starting to use the docs/process.
At this stage it still requires me to work closely with the
project to ensure they understand the docs, but the system
is working. This will scale better as the docs are improved
through experience.
STANDARDS LICENSING: The standards patent covenant that I have
mentioned giving feedback on over the last couple reports
was made public about one week ago: the Microsoft "Open
Specification Promise". While it is not perfect, I
believe it should not block PMCs wishing to implement
covered specifications.
USPTO/OSDL's OSAPA: The Open Source As Prior Art initiative
met in Portland, OR, last week for two days. I was able
to join the group for the second day to learn a little
about what is being planned. Will follow-up with email
to board@.
THIRD-PARTY LICENSING POLICY: Haven't gotten to this yet, but
hoping to make minor revisions and make enforcement
approach clear in doc (as described in previous reports)
and then call it final, and ideally have it included in
same email to committers as alerts on src header and
crypto docs. (No change since last month)
OSS PROJECT CODE MOVED TO ASF: When an incubating project's
initial code base is submitted to the ASF, our CLA
requires that "work that is not Your original creation"
must be submitted "separately from any Contribution,
identifying the complete details of its source and...
conspicuously marking the work as "Submitted on behalf of
a third-party: [named here]". This presents a problem
when the code base is an existing OSS project with
intermingled IP from various sources. One solution I've
seen in the past is for the multiple authors to jointly
sign the same grant; however, due to a few problems with
this approach, I've worked with one set of initial
contributors to create a script that uses svn blame/log
and a mapping file (svn id or a rev # --> legal owner) to
output an exhaustive set of annotations to satisfy this
requirement.
PATENT LICENSING IN CCLAS: I am late on getting this report
done. I'm still having discussions with our lawyers and
other members of the open source community on a daily /
weekly basis. The goals of the report are to detail the
ambiguities in the patent language of the current CCLA
and to suggest that the board consider options, such as
specific clarifications, revisions, and supplementary
processes. These can be discussed at today's meeting if
the board wishes; in addition, Doug Cutting would like the
board to consider an FAQ to address some aspect of the
CCLA's ambiguity.
Cliff also reported that he will commit to having the
3rd Party issues complete by ApacheCon Austin.

August 16, 2006

4. Officer Reports
E. VP of Legal Affairs [Cliff]
LICENSING HEADER: About to move the deadline back to Nov 1st
due to my slowness in getting out an email to committers@
pointing to new policy. However, many projects are
already switching over from pointers on legal-discuss.
CRYPTO EXPORT DOCS: Lots of work with APR and especially
James on fine-tuning the format for the email reports and
web page. Have updated the docs to reflect this. Pretty
much done now -- just need to include this on the
committers@ email (see above re: license header).
THIRD-PARTY LICENSING POLICY: Haven't gotten to this yet, but
hoping to make minor revisions and make enforcement
approach clear in doc (as described in previous reports)
and then call it final, and ideally have it included in
same email to committers as alerts on src header and
crypto docs. (No change since last month)
PATENT LICENSING IN CCLAS: I've continued to do some
research and have some discussions with various companies
and other open source organizations on this topic. I
still hope to have a report comparing the options by the
end of this month.
STANDARDS LICENSING: A large software company will be soon
be releasing a new patent license (actually a promise
not to sue), under which several specifications will be
covered. Much of our feedback has been incorporated
into the latest draft. I expect we will be satisfied
with the final result (TBA this month).

July 19, 2006

4. Officer Reports
E. VP of Legal Affairs [Cliff]
LEGAL HOME PAGE: Have created new legal home page with links
to docs relevant for users and committers. Also posting
and linking to these legal reports for interested
committers to track progress. Please let me know if
there are any concerns about this. Will publicize the
legal home page and its links on Friday in email to
committers@.
LICENSING HEADER: The final version is now posted, linked
from the new legal web page: apache.org/legal. Email to
committers will go out on Friday.
CRYPTO EXPORT DOCS: A nearly final version of this is posted
including a lengthy FAQ from various dev-list
discussions. Last step is to work with dreid on project-
specific RDF files that build final required web page.
Hoping to have this also done and in email to committers
on Friday.
THIRD-PARTY LICENSING POLICY: Haven't gotten to this yet, but
hoping to make minor revisions and make enforcement
approach clear in doc (as described in previous reports)
and then call it final, and ideally have it included in
same email to committers as alerts on src header and
crypto docs.
PATENT LICENSING IN CCLAS: I've tried to keep the board
aware enough of this discussion over the last 2-3 months
to jump in as any director sees fit; however, recent
discussions on board@ lead me to believe that I should
request this to become an item of new business, rather
than wait for another director to inquire more about it.
I suggest a brief conversation on the topic today,
followed by a more detailed presentation of the concerns
of each side of the issue at some point in the near
future.
SFLC LETTER ON ODF: After clarifying with SFLC that we did
not want their letter to represent an "Apache position"
on ODF nor did we want our name used in any PR on the
subject, I agreed to the text of their letter. Since
publishing the letter several weeks ago, they appear to
have honored my requests completely.
STANDARDS LICENSING: I continue to have conversations with
vendors on how they can improve the licensing of their
essential patent claims for specifications that Apache
would consider implementing. I'm actually seeing some
progress/willingness to revise from vendors.

June 27, 2006

4. Officer Reports
E. VP of Legal Affairs [Cliff]
LICENSING HEADER: I sent a summary of the resolution passed
at last month's meeting to the legal-discuss list and
am compiling a short FAQ based on questions from that
thread. The summary and FAQ will be linked from a new
apache.org/legal/ home page by the end of the week, and
send a notification of the posting to committers@. I
originally stated that the new header would need to be
implemented on releases on or after August 1, 2006,
but will push that date back one month, since I was slow
to get this out to all committers.
PATENT LICENSING IN CCLAS: There continues to be some degree
of controversy over my statement on how the CCLA patent
license should be interpreted. I continue to state
that the patents are licensed for both the contribution
and combinations of the contribution with the continuing
evolution of the project. In other words, the ASF is
not interested in contributions with strings attached
(strings = restrictions on what it can be combined with).
SFLC LETTER ON ODF: The SFLC has asked us to review a draft
statement on the legal encumbrances of the OASIS ODF
specification. If we agree with the draft, they would
like to issue a statement that they are representing the
positions on two of their clients, the ASF and FSF.

May 24, 2006

4. Officer Reports
E. VP of Legal Affairs [Cliff]
LICENSING HEADER: I have submitted a resolution for the
Board's consideration to set a new policy for source
code headers. In brief, the headers will no longer
include any copyright notice, only a licensing notice
and a mention of the NOTICE file for copyright info.
The NOTICE file will include the ASF's copyright notice,
in addition to other required notices. Copyright
notices in third-party components distributed within ASF
products will not be touched.
CRYPTO EXPORT POLICY: I have posted a crypto policy at
http://apache.org/dev/crypto.html. The policy should
answer most of our questions in this area, but will be
gradually enhanced over time.
GPLv3 COMPATIBILITY: After a close review of the first draft
of GPLv3, I brought up potential incompatibility issues
with the Apache License to the GPLv3 discussion committee
that I serve on. The FSF's counsel hopes these issues
can be addressed in the next draft. As I've said before,
both the FSF and the SFLC continue to be unwavering in
their dedication to ensure GPLv3 is compatible with Apache
License v2.
PATENT LICENSING IN CCLAS: I've spent a lot of time with
one particular corporate legal staff lately with their
questions of whether the CCLA implies that the set of all
possible patent claims being licensed can be known at the
time of contribution. It's obvious why a corporation
would want the answer to be affirmative; however, such an
answer would not protect the project's work from patent
infringement claims by a contributor regarding how their
contribution is combined with other things. It may be
worth revising the (C)CLA language to make this more
clear.
ELECTRONICALLY SUBMITTED AGREEMENTS: Now allowed. See the
Secretary's report.
LICENSING AUDITS: I work closely with the Eclipse Foundation's
IP Manager, who continues to inform me of apparent
inconsistencies and inaccuracies in the licensing of
ASF products. I've been asking PMCs to address these
issues as they come up, but what we really need is an
internal audit on each product to get these problems
fixed. Before we can do that, we need complete
documentation on the things an audit should look for and
how they should be corrected. I will likely make this a
priority for the "Docathon" at ApacheCon EU next month.
THIRD-PARTY IP: Due to the issues above, I've neglected to
make the few remaining changes to the draft licensing
policy doc and publish the official version. As I
mentioned last month, I intend to tell PMCs that all new
products MUST conform to the policy, but that all
existing products that do not currently conform need to
only take one action over the next six months: report
where/how they are not conforming so that the practical
impact of the policy can be better understood without
yet requiring substantial changes. The philosophy
behind this "impact evaluation period" is that the
policy was primarily intended to document the mostly
unwritten rules today and to choose one rule when
multiple exist across the ASF. Now that I've cleared
the license header and crypto issues off the high
priority list, I hope to focus exclusively (as much as
possible) on getting the 1.0 version out.
6. Special Orders
C. Establish guidelines for handling copyright notices and license
headers.
WHEREAS, the copyright of contributions to The Apache
Software Foundation remains with the contribution's owner(s),
but the copyright of the collective work in each Foundation
release is owned by the Foundation,
WHEREAS, each file within a Foundation release often includes
contributions from multiple copyright owners,
WHEREAS, the Foundation has observed that per-file attribution
of authorship does not promote collaborative development,
WHEREAS, inclusion of works that have not been directly
submitted by the copyright owners to the Foundation for
development does not present the same collaborative
development issues and does not allow the owners to consider
the Foundation's copyright notice policies;
NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED that for the case of copyright
notices in files contributed and licensed to The Apache
Software Foundation, the copyright owner (or owner's agent)
must either: remove such notices, move them to the NOTICE
file associated with each applicable project release, or
provide written permission for the Foundation to make such
removal or relocation of the notices, and be it further
RESOLVED, that each release shall include a NOTICE file for
such copyright notices and other notices required to accompany
the distribution, and be it further
RESOLVED, that the NOTICE file shall begin with the following
text, suitably modified to reflect the product name, version,
and year(s) of distribution of the current and past releases:
Apache [PRODUCT_NAME]
Copyright [yyyy] The Apache Software Foundation
This product includes software developed at
The Apache Software Foundation (http://www.apache.org/).
and be it further
RESOLVED, that files licensed to The Apache Software
Foundation shall be labeled with the following notice:
Licensed to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) under one
or more contributor license agreements. See the NOTICE file
distributed with this work for additional information
regarding copyright ownership. The ASF licenses this file
to you under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the
"License"); you may not use this file except in compliance
with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at
http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing,
software distributed under the License is distributed on an
"AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY
KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the
specific language governing permissions and limitations
under the License.
and be it further
RESOLVED, that for the case of works that have not been
directly submitted by the copyright owners to the Foundation
for development, the associated copyright notices for the work
shall not be moved, removed, or modified.
By Unanimous Vote, Special Order 6C, Establish guidelines for
handling copyright notices and license headers, was Approved.

April 26, 2006

4. Officer Reports
E. VP of Legal Affairs [Cliff]
Cliff reported that the 3rd Party License report will
likely be officially released later on this month (April),
at which point he will start on the Copyright/Header
issues. Regarding the 3rd Party License report, it is
fully expected that, even though discussed and reviewed,
there will be further discussions upon release. The board's
stand is that we should release it "as is" and retify
things if required. All new projects will need to adhere
to the policy; existing projects will be given time to
bring their codebases up to policy standards.
The board expressed their appreciation to Cliff for
a Job Well Done.

March 15, 2006

4. Officer Reports
E. VP of Legal Affairs [Cliff]
THIRD-PARTY IP: After nearly two months of review on the
board@ list and one month of review by pmcs@, I've
finally posted the latest draft of the third-party
licensing policy to the legal-discuss list. My goal
is to get all new comments or concerns collected by
the end of the month, and resolve all issues to get
a final, official, v1.0 release in April. I will
also be trying to solicit user comments through the
feather blog and a brief pointer sent to a few of
the project user lists. However, I would also like
to explicitly verify that there is a consensus from
the Board in support of the guiding principles*
behind the policy and the resulting license criteria**.
*http://people.apache.org/~cliffs/3party.html#principles
**http://people.apache.org/~cliffs/3party.html#criteria
LICENSING HEADER, ETC: Now that the third-party policy
doc is out there, my next major project is to draft
and get our counsel to approve a document that
updates our source code licensing header,
describes where to place copyright notices, various
third-party licenses, explains how to deal with
crypto export issues, and more. Although I think it
will be useful to our committers to have this all in
one document, I won't hold up getting a resolution on
the license header/copyright notice issue to wait for
the rest of the document.

January 18, 2006

4. Officer Reports
E. V.P. of Legal Affairs [Cliff]
GPLv3: I just finished attending the GPLv3 conference at MIT,
during which the first "discussion draft" of the GPLv3
was presented. The most relevant news is that the current
discussion draft includes a "License Compatibility"
section that allows the inclusion of Apache-Licensed (v2.0)
independent works within GPLv3-licensed programs. This
section may change within the next year, but it remains
clear that Eben and RMS will continue to make this sort
of compatibility with the Apache License a priority. The
other news is that I have accepted an invitation to
represent the ASF on one the GPLv3 "discussion committees".
THIRD-PARTY IP: I will be sending out a draft policy on third-
party IP to the board@ list this Friday, January 20th.
Cliff further reported that the Copyright Notice Policy
was still being worked on, and will be finished some time
after the completion of the 3rd Party License Policy
Report.

December 21, 2005

4. Officer Reports
E. V.P. of Legal Affairs [Cliff Schmidt]
PATENT ISSUES: I had a second meeting with Microsoft about
possible improvements to the patent licenses that they
have stated would apply to various WS specifications at
OASIS. Details can be found in my summary post to
legal-internal on 6 Dec 05 (Message-Id:
<81007DBD-EBD8-45DC-8A35-0FB8F4F3FC11@apache.org>. I've
since asked them about the possibility of issuing a
Covenant not to enforce patent claims, similar to what they
recently did for Office 2003 Reference Schemas. No
response on that one just yet.
GPLv3 COMPATIBILITY: Eben Moglen and RMS have each personally
asked that the ASF participate in the GPLv3 input/feedback
process, primarily to help ensure compatibility between
the GPL and Apache licenses. I plan to attend the first
GPLv3 conference at MIT in January for that purpose.
THIRD-PARTY IP: After talking with 20+ ASF members at ApacheCon
about a proposed licensing policy, I am now ready to float
something formal by the membership. The short version is
that I believe we need to draw the licensing line at the
ability for our users to redistribute all parts of an
official ASF distribution under their own license, as long
as it does not violate the copyright owner's license. I'm
working up a list of how this would impact the top 30 OSI-
approved licenses and a few others, but I can tell you it
would exclude both the LGPL and the Sun Binary Code
License, which is currently used in Apache James.
LAME LIST: In prior reports I said I expected to have a policy
written on crypto export and copyright notices. I'm late
on both. I am now able to projects with the correct
procedure for crypto, but I still need to get it formally
documented.

November 16, 2005

4. Officer Reports
E. V.P. of Legal Affairs [Cliff Schmidt]
SFLC: Justin and I had a kick-off meeting with Eben and two
of his lawyers. Justin and Greg are already working
with one of them to handle any issues with our books
and 501(c)(3) status. Justin is the point person for
this work and will be handling ongoing status in his
Treasurer's report.
BXA/CRYPTO: The Perl folks sent out the required notification
for the mod_ssl stuff. I've now taken their feedback and
drafted a process document to run through counsel Jason
has referred me to another EFF lawyer with more crypto
export experience who has agreed to review it.
COPYRIGHT NOTICS: Our counsel will be giving one final review
on the copyright notice issue starting this Friday
(during a monthly teleconference). Should have something
ready within one week after that.
LGPL: I'm still waiting on feedback from Eben on my
Java/LGPL position paper that I sent him last month. He
wanted to refrain from giving me feedback until
discussing the matter with the FSF. I expect to have
something any day now, since that meeting should have
recently happened. I recommend we hold off any decision
to allow distribution of LGPL components within non-
incubating product JARs until getting this one last
opinion from Eben and then bouncing it off the rest of
our counsel. However, I do not think we should have any
legal concern about separately distributing the LGPL and
ASF component that depends on it; both Jason and Larry
have signed off on this question.
THIRD-PARTY IP: In the process of working on a document to
get us to a comprehensive policy on what third-party
software we will distribute and how, I have created a
little matrix to summarize the issues across the most
common licenses of interest to the ASF today. I will
send this matrix to legal-discuss list today for
discussion. It might also be helpful for discussing
how LGPL is similar and different from licenses like
the CPL and CDDL.
ASF LEGAL POLICY DOC: All these issues and more are being
written to live within a series of ASF legal policy
documents that I am hoping to have approved at or soon
after ApacheCon.
HOUSEKEEPING: I've created a new directory /foundation/legal/
Board to include all Legal reports and approved
resolutions with a README indicating that they are
compiled there for convenience and with a pointer to
the normative versions.

October 26, 2005

4. Officer Reports
E. V.P. of Legal Affairs [Cliff Schmidt]
ADDITIONAL COUNSEL: I have signed an agreement with Eben
Moglen of the Software Freedom Law Center to have them
offer the ASF pro bono legal services. The first job
will be to work with Justin on renewing our 501(c)(3)
status and some of the thorny issues we need to resolve
to get our books in order.
BXA/CRYPTO: While I was working on a draft crypto policy,
I was notified that the Perl PMC (and Tomcat?) may not
have sent notification to the Bureau of Industry and
Security (BIS, formerly known as BXA). This has
required me to try out specific guidance on these two
projects, which will hopefully make the formal policy
more robust. I'm still working with the Perl and
Tomcat PMCs to help solve their immediate issues. Most
of the relevant discussion has been cc'd to
legal-internal.
COPYRIGHT NOTICES: Last month I reported that I was getting
general agreement from our counsel to move to a policy
that requires only a licensing notice, but not a
copyright notice at the top of each source file. I
regret to say that I have made very little progress on
this issue since last month. I'll have this ready for
next board meeting.
LGPL: Last month I reported that this issue needs to be
addressed within the context of an overall policy stating
what licenses are acceptable for ASF distributions to
take dependencies on and distribute (see "Third Party IP"
issue below). Ten days ago, I sent Eben Moglen (in his
role as general counsel for the FSF) a five-page document
(including a developer-focused FAQ) on my interpretation
of exactly what the LGPL allows and does not allow related
to Java dependencies and distribution requirements. He
has not given me feedback on this yet, but has been
talking about releasing a similar position paper on behalf
of the FSF.
THIRD-PARTY IP: Last month I reported that most of the
licenses we thought we could sublicense under the Apache
License (including the CPL) can really only be distributed
under their own license. So, we now need to figure out what
makes a license okay to include in an Apache distribution.
I've made very little progress on this in the last month, but
I hope to have a policy written, discussed, and ready for
approval by the December board meeting.
ASF LEGAL POLICY DOC: Although I did not make as much progress
as I'd hoped on the copyright notice and third-party IP
issues over the last month, I did write up and outline for
an overall legal policy doc to address these issues and
others. The outline (including a brief preview of where
the document was probably headed) was sent to legal-discuss.

September 21, 2005

4. Officer Reports
E. V.P. of Legal Affairs [Cliff Schmidt]
COPYRIGHT NOTICES: I have gotten Jason, Larry, Robyn, and
even Eben Moglen to all agree that we should be fine
with no copyright notice at the top of each source file,
and instead just include a licensing notice similar to
what Roy recently posted to the Board@ list. The issue
that isn't quite solved yet is the mechanics of ensuring
any COPYRIGHT file or section of the NOTICE file is in
sync with the CLAs and agreements from outside contributors.
BXA/CRYPTO: I now have an understanding of the open source
exception to the crypto export requirements. I've read
through the relevant docs at bxa.doc.gov, eff.org, and
a legal opinion from McGlashan & Sarrail dated
September 13, 2000, which I found in /foundation/Records/BXA.
There was a minor (generally favorable) change to the
TSU exception (the one that applies to open source) last
December. The bottom line is that there appears to be no
problem with distributing source or binaries as long as we
give appropriate notice to the BXA/BIS. My next step is to
get an updated opinion from Jason and publish guidelines to
PMCs.
LGPL: There's the legal requirements side of this issue and
the policy side (as with so many things). I believe I have
already completed the due dilligence on the legal
requirements side; however, during conversations with Eben
Moglen I've found that he plans to publish a document that
is explicit about the issues or non-issues with Java and
the LGPL. I will be sending him my view of these issues
this week, which I hope will influence what ends up in his
document. On the policy side, we need to stop treating the
LGPL differently from other licenses, and instead determine
what our policy is for taking dependencies on and
distributing third-party IP.
THIRD-PARTY IP: Any time we bring in third-party IP that is
not licensed under the Apache License, we have two choices:
a) sublicense the work under the Apache License (if we have
the rights to do so), or b) distribute the Apache product
under each applicable license and make that clear to our
users. We've been trying to say we're only doing a) so far.
However, in my view we are obviously not consistently doing
this, nor do I think it is practical to do so. So, I'm now
thinking the best way to address issues of shipping CPL,
MPL, CDDL, LGPL, etc. is to stop trying to sublicense them
under the Apache License and instead create and implement
a policy that allows us to distribute products that contain
IP under some set of license terms (including terms outside
the scope of the Apache License).

August 17, 2005

4. Officer Reports
E. V.P. of Legal Affairs [Cliff Schmidt]
I've inserted slightly edited versions of the same MPL/NPL
and LGPL resolutions, which were tabled last month.
Since last month's meeting, I have:
- confirmed with a second member of ASF's legal counsel
that the proposed LGPL policy does not put our product
licensing at risk;
- posted and discussed the proposed LGPL policy on the
legal-discuss list, where no new concerns were raised
about the licensing ramifications; however there was
concern raised by both outside lawyers and Apache
committers that dependencies on LGPL libraries was not
in the best interests of some Apache users;
- engaged with representatives of the Mozilla Foundation
to discuss the proposed MPL/NPL licensing policy. While
they have *not* yet formally indicated their agreement
with our interpretation, they have not yet raised any
new concerns.
Future action items include resolving the BXA/crypto issue
and investigating and proposing policies for the CPL, EPL,
and CDDL licenses.
Finally, one of my short-term objectives is to overhaul the
legal STATUS file to reflect the current priorities and
status.
6. Special Orders
B. Allow redistribution of MPL- and NPL-licensed executables
WHEREAS, some Project Management Committees (PMCs) within
The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) expect to better serve
their mission through the use and redistribution of the
executable form of existing source code licensed under the
Mozilla Public License (MPL) or Netscape Public License (NPL);
and
WHEREAS, it is the ASF's interpretation that the MPL and NPL
licenses permit distribution of such executables under the
terms of the Apache License, Version 2.0, provided the terms
applicable to the associated source code have been complied
with and that appropriate entries made in the ASF
distribution's NOTICE file; and
WHEREAS, the current ASF licensing policy discourages the
distribution of intellectual property by the ASF under terms
beyond those stated in the Apache License, Version 2.0.
NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED, that PMCs may use and
redistribute the executable form of existing source code
licensed under the MPL 1.0, MPL 1.1, NPL 1.0, or NPL 1.1;
and be it further
RESOLVED, that PMCs must ensure such redistribution only
occurs after appropriate entries have been made in the ASF
distribution's NOTICE file and only if the PMC finds that
the MPL/NPL terms applicable to the associated source code
appear to have been satisfied.
Special Order 6B, Allow redistribution of MPL- and NPL-licensed
executables, was Approved by Unanimous Consent.
C. Allow product dependencies on LGPL-licensed libraries
WHEREAS, some Project Management Committees (PMCs) within
The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) expect to better serve
their mission through the occasional dependency on existing
LGPL-licensed libraries when no other practical alternative
exists under terms covered by the Apache License, Version 2.0;
and
WHEREAS, research into the impact of distributing ASF products
that depend on the presence of LGPL-licensed libraries
indicates that the product licensing terms are not affected by
such a dependency; and
WHEREAS, the current ASF licensing policy discourages the
distribution of intellectual property by the ASF under terms
beyond those stated in the Apache License, Version 2.0.
NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED, that PMCs may develop and
distribute products that depend on the presence of
LGPL-licensed libraries when no other practical alternative
exists under terms covered by the Apache License, Version 2.0;
and be it further
RESOLVED, that PMCs will register such use of an LGPL-licensed
library with the Vice President of Legal Affairs prior to the
PMC's next regularly scheduled Board report, and in no case
less than two weeks prior to the distribution of the
applicable product(s); and be it further
RESOLVED, that PMCs will continue to reevaluate whether a
practical alternative exists under terms covered by the Apache
License, Version 2.0, which could be substituted in place of
the LGPL-licensed library; and be it further
RESOLVED, that PMCs must continue to ensure that they do not
distribute LGPL-licensed libraries or any other intellectual
property that is only available under licenses with terms
beyond those stated in the Apache License, Version 2.0.
Special Order 6C, Allow product dependencies on LGPL-licensed
libraries, was Tabled. The main discussion points were
whether the permission of dependencies invalidated the
spirit of the ASF and the Apache License. Discussion was
to be continued on the Board mailing list.

July 28, 2005

4. Officer Reports
E. V.P. of Legal Affairs [Cliff Schmidt]
See Special Orders for two proposed resolutions.
The first resolution allows PMCs to develop and distribute
software that depends on the presence of LGPL-licensed
libraries, *without* distributing the libraries themselves.
After numerous discussions with the FSF, other LGPL licensors,
and ASF counsel, Larry Rosen, it appears that such a policy
should not impact the product licensing. In order to allow
PMCs to apply this policy to all useful LGPL-licensed
libraries, the resolution does not require the PMCs to get
an agreement from each copyright owner, but instead requires
the PMC to register the use of the particular LGPL library
with the VP of Legal Affairs. See my post to the board@
list for more details ("My recommendation for an ASF policy on
the LGPL").
The second resolution allows PMCs to redistribute MPL/NPL-
licensed executables. The key difference between the MPL/NPL
and the LGPL regarding redistribution requirements is that the
MPL/NPL allows redistribution under any license (provided that
the distributor complies with the applicable terms of the
MPL/NPL); the LGPL requires redistribution of either the source
or executable of the library to be licensed only under the LGPL.
While the MPL 1.0, MPL 1.1, NPL 1.0, and NPL 1.1 are nearly
identical in their treatment of redistribution of executables,
it is important to note that the NPL licenses are not OSI-
approved, as they discriminate in favor of Netscape, weakening
the terms that Netscape has to comply with relative to other
users. See my post to the board@ list for more details ("MPL/NPL
Issue: My recommendation for an ASF policy on the MPL/NPL").
NOTE: Larry Rosen has agreed with my analysis of the MPL/NPL
licenses as described in the referenced post; however, yesterday
he suggested that I confirm that Mitchell Baker also agrees
(author of the licenses). I have not yet received her response.
This could be a reason to table this resolution.
6. Special Orders
E. Allow product dependencies on LGPL-licensed libraries
WHEREAS, some Project Management Committees (PMCs) within
The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) expect to better serve
their mission through the use of existing LGPL-licensed
libraries as a product dependency; and
WHEREAS, research into the impact of distributing ASF products
that depend on the presence of LGPL-licensed libraries has
indicated that the product licensing terms are not affected by
such a dependency; and
WHEREAS, the current ASF licensing policy continues to require
all intellectual property distributed by the ASF be licensed
under the Apache License, Version 2.0.
NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED, that PMCs may develop and
distribute products that depend on the presence of
LGPL-licensed libraries; and be it further
RESOLVED, that PMCs will register such use of an LGPL-licensed
library with the Vice President of Legal Affairs prior to the
PMC's next regularly scheduled Board report, and in no case
less than one week prior to the distribution of the applicable
product(s); and be it further
RESOLVED, that PMCs must continue to ensure they do not
distribute LGPL-licensed libraries or any other intellectual
property that cannot be strictly licensed under the Apache
License, Version 2.0.
Discussion occurred that raised questions: Is the FSF position
public? Will downstream users be comfortable with this? The
conclusion was to give 3rd parties time to react to this
proposed resolution prior to voting on it. Resolution 6E
was tabled with general consent.
F. Allow redistribution of MPL- and NPL-licensed executables
WHEREAS, some Project Management Committees (PMCs) within
The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) expect to better serve
their mission through the use and redistribution of existing
software executables that are licensed under the Mozilla Public
License (MPL) or Netscape Public License (NPL); and
WHEREAS, research into the impact of distributing MPL- and
NPL-licensed executables indicated that such distribution
is allowed under the terms of the Apache License, Version 2.0,
only if specific entries made in the NOTICE file and if the
associated source code complies with the applicable terms of
the MPL/NPL; and
WHEREAS, the current ASF licensing policy continues to require
all intellectual property distributed by the ASF be licensed
under the Apache License, Version 2.0.
NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED, that PMCs may use and
redistribute software executables that are licensed under the
MPL 1.0, MPL 1.1, NPL 1.0, or NPL 1.1; and be it further
RESOLVED, that PMCs must ensure such redistribution only occurs
after entries are made in the associated product's NOTICE file
in compliance with the terms of the MPL/NPL, and that the
associated source code also complies with the applicable terms
of the MPL/NPL.
Resolution 6F was tabled with general consent. Questions arose
why MPL 1.0 was not ok before. It is suggested to get feedback
from Mitchel Baker.
Action Item: Review earlier arguments why MPL 1.0 was not ok.

June 22, 2005

6. Special Orders
B. Appoint a Vice President of Legal Affairs
WHEREAS, the Board of Directors deems it to be in the best
interests of the Foundation and consistent with the
Foundation's purpose to appoint an officer responsible
for legal affairs, including but not limited to streamlining
communication between the Foundation's Project Management
Committees, legal counsel, the Board and other parties
pertaining to legal issues.
NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED that the office of
"Vice President of Legal Affairs" be and hereby created,
the person holding such office to serve at the direction
of the Board of Directors, and to have primary responsibility
of coordinating the Foundation's legal counsel pertaining to
legal issues; and be it further
RESOLVED, that Cliff Schmidt be and hereby is appointed to
the office of Vice President of Legal Affairs, to serve in
accordance with and subject to the direction of the Board
of Directors and the Bylaws of the Foundation until death,
resignation, retirement, removal or disqualification, or
until a successor is appointed.
By Unanimous Vote, Cliff Schmidt was appointed as VP of
Legal Affairs.